Re: working on text mode

[Joel Granados <jgranado redhat com>]

----- "Oron Peled" <oron actcom co il> wrote:

> On Friday, 23 בJanuary 2009, Chris Lumens wrote:
> > - If the graphical installer doesn't work, the fix is not to have a
> >   completely different path to go down.  The fix is to fix
> graphical
> >   installs.  Having said this, we still do have work arounds
> possible.
> >   You can always add xdriver=vesa as a boot parameter if the normal
> driver
> >   for your card doesn't work under X.  My latest patch to the list
> makes
> >   it more obvious that you can do this.
> 
> I beg to digress, as text mode installation has more important roles
> than
> working around broken X.
> 
> Two use cases:
>  * A small/old-hardware server without enough RAM.
>    I lately installed two such hosts, one is an old Pentium used as
>    firewall. The other is a small server used in a school (which now
>    has its RAM upgraded, but wasn't few months ago during install) --
>    In both cases X or vnc install was not possible, but both has
> Fedora
>    up and running (one F8, later upgraded to F10, the other a fresh
>    F10 install).

And this will most probably still be possible with the reduced text installs.

> 
>  * A capable server where we don't want no X (e.g: minimizing
> security
>    exposure).
>    Yes, we could install it with X and remove it after the
> installation
>    but it's pretty lame. Yes, we would prefer to do a kickstart
>    install, but sometimes it's problematic -- think about a first
>    Linux server in a small Windows-centric environment --
>    you don't necessarily have full cooperation of the network gods,
>    sometimes you can't even talk to them (outsourced network
> management).

If you install using GUI, the resulting installation doesn't necessarily have to have X.  I do those types of installations all the time.  Where I use GUI and then select the minimal packages for installation (that don't include X)

Ok, If you can't talk to the people that handle a major infrastructure element in the company (networking), there is a bigger problem than not having text installs. IMO.

> 
> IMHO, the idea to minimize the text install is very good. When
> deciding
> in what features to include during such an install, the basic
> question
> should be -- can this be added/configured after the install?
> 
> For example, I don't see any problem in totally cutting the UI for
> software selection step and installing only @Base (or what kickstart
> says).
> In interactive mode, the admin can always do a yum install (or
> groupinstall)
> later.
> 
> However, missing an important feature that cannot be fixed after the
> installation (e.g: LVM, encrypted partitions for the installed
> partitions)
> is simply a bug -- again the UI doesn't have to pretty since I'm
> talking
> about a corner case, but it should be *possible* to install in such
> cases.
> 
> One last note about the difficulty of squeezing LVM definitions into
> a text UI. This looks hard if we assume everything should be put
> into the same dialog box. If we split it to steps (VG's, PV's for each
> VG,
> LV's for each VG), it should be easy (not the code, the UI design ;-)
> 
> OK, that's was a long one, sorry.
> 
> -- 
> Oron Peled                                 Voice: +972-4-8228492
> oron actcom co il                  http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron
> "Your fair use of this book is restricted"
> "You may only read this book once"
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Anaconda-devel-list mailing list
> Anaconda-devel-list redhat com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list

-- 
Joel Andres Granados
Red Hat / Brno Czech Republic